Robert Kusnierz. Harvard Ukrainian Studies. Volume 30, Annual 2008.
The historiography of the Great Famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine is quite extensive. Numerous works that approach the Holodomor from various different perspectives have appeared, first in the West, and-after perestroika-in the former Soviet Union as well. In post-communist Poland, historians have until recently shown little interest in the tragedy of its neighbor to the east. The first Polish academic monograph on the subject appeared only in 2005. Following the publication of that book, the present author began a research project examining the way the Holodomor was depicted in Polish diplomatic and intelligence reports. This research resulted in several articles as well as a book, published in May 2008, tided Pomor w “raju bolszewickim”: Glod na Ukrainie w latach 1932-1933 w swietle polskich dokumentow dyplomatycznych i dokumentow wywiadu (A Plague in “Bolshevik Paradise”: The Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933 in Light of Polish Diplomatic and Intelligence Reports), in which newly discovered materials from the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as from Division II of the Main Staff of the Polish Armed Forces (military intelligence), were published for the first time.
In the interwar period, there were two consulates active in the Ukraine, one in Kyiv, the other in Kharkiv (which was liquidated under pressure from the Bolsheviks in late 1937). Another important source of information about Ukraine was the Polish legation (after 1934, embassy) in Moscow. To this day, historians are little acquainted with archival materials relating to Polish diplomacy and military intelligence (Division II), particularly those stored at the Central Military Archives, despite the unique and extensive information they provide about Poland’s eastern neighbors prior to World War II.
It is on the basis of these materials that the present paper about the impact of the Holodomor on Ukrainian cities has been written. It should be noted from the start that although Polish archives contain a great deal of material on the situation in Ukraine after the famine (1933-39), both in cities and in the countryside, the precise impact of the Holodomor on Ukrainian cities was not at the center of concerns of the Polish diplomats and intelligence officers. Most information on the consequences of the famine, for urban as well as nonurban areas, typically appears in documents dealing with the famine in some larger context. For the most part, these materials date from 1932 to 1934. After 1934, the number of documents drops off significantly, and one can argue that these “later” documents are only tenuously related to the topic at hand. That is not to say that relevant documents from the post-1934 period never existed. In the course of my research, for example, I came across a document from Division II of the Main Staff dated 20 January 1939, in which an officer at the Moscow intelligence outpost Z.15, Maksymilian Kurnatowski, was ordered to write a report on issues of ethnicity in the Soviet Union and the Ukrainian problem in particular. The report was concerned with, among other issues, ethnic shifts in urban and rural areas and their causes; tendentious nationality policies (colonization, involuntary emigration, deportation); spontaneous human migration (economically motivated flight); famine, and so on. Unfortunately this report could not be found in the archives.
The most obvious consequence of the famine was the visible influx of starving people from the countryside, which could not have gone unnoticed by Polish consuls. They would have noted the radical changes in the appearance of Ukrainian cities, which were filling up with starving refugees from the countryside. They would have seen them standing for days at a time in mile-long bread lines, begging for aid, and finally dying in the streets of Kharkiv, Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Uman, and other Ukrainian cities. On 7 May 1932, Antoni Zmigrodzki, the commerce counselor for the Polish legation in Moscow, wrote to the minister of industry and commerce in Warsaw that there was a visible influx of peasants looking for bread in Ukrainain cities, industrial centers, and railroads.
In the first week or so of April 1934 (the famine ended in 1933), Jan Lagoda, the deputy commerce counselor for the Polish embassy in Moscow, undertook a railway tour of areas affected by the famine, including Kyiv, Korosten, Zhytomyr, Berdychiv, and Koziatyn, among others. He reported that there were still large numbers of starving people in the areas he visited. “I have seen many people who were visibly starving. Railway stations are full of abandoned children living however they can. Passengers having a snack at the station are stared at not only by starving children, but by adults as well. At the Uman station I counted twenty-three abandoned children between the ages of five and twelve.”
Based on what they saw with their own eyes, or on reliable and numerous sources, Polish consular officials sent reports to their superiors about the fact that emaciated people were dying in the streets of cities. On 11 May 1932, Henryk Jankowski, the Polish consul in Kyiv, reported to the ambassador in Moscow that in such cities as Vinnytsia and Uman, people who had collapsed from weakness or exhaustion were removed from the streets on a daily basis. (9) Jozefina Pisarczykowna, an official at the Polish consulate in Kharkiv, related the following on 13 June 1933: “There are dying people and corpses in the streets. Cars full of policemen drive around the city and pick up anyone suspicious-looking or poor. They are taken to the barracks, where, it is said, the completely emaciated ones are given lethal injections.”
Stanislaw Sosnicki, the Polish consul in Kyiv, gave the following account to Division II:
In mid-June [1933] the residents of Kharkiv were regularly exposed to the sight of people dying in the main streets of the city as well as phantom-like people with deranged eyes, who circled the city aimlessly. On 22 June, in the course of a half-hour walk down the main street of Kharkov, Sumska Street, I saw one corpse and one person in the throes of death. Over the past three weeks corpses have been collected with ever increasing frequency and speed. The homeless are picked up as well; they are cleaned up and forced onto state farms. At the end of June we witnessed daily raids on homeless children [bezprizorni], A doctor we knew told us that people who were completely exhausted were injected with poison.
A direct consequence of the famine was numerous acts of cannibalism. These acts occurred with the greatest frequency in rural areas; however cities were not spared this horror either. In a report on the Ukrainian situation dated 17 March 1933, Jan Karszo-Siedlewski, head of the Polish Consulate General in Kharkiv and counselor to the legation (embassy), noted the arrest of a railway guard stationed at Pechanivka in the Liubar raion of Berdychiv district, who was apprehended on 21 February 1933 for cannibalism. He was turned in by his own wife. He had terrorized her, forcing her to prepare meals from the flesh of murdered victims, whom he had lured to his house on the pretext of putting them up for the night. The counselor noted that probably he had a number of people on his conscience, because he had occasionally sold the flesh of those he killed. On the basis of information obtained from a reliable informant in Berdychiv, Polish intelligence claimed that in June 1933 children were hunted by night on the outskirts of the city. “No mother would let her children out on the street after nightfall,” the report claimed. Two months later, in August 1933, an intelligence report stated that the prisons were full of cannibals. In the Kyiv prison alone there were several dozen people suspected of such acts.
Another consequence of the famine for cities was the mobilization of urban populations seeking work in the countryside. Owing to the large-scale demise of the peasantry, there was a shortage of hands for fieldwork. As a result, the Bolsheviks had to send out numerous groups of people from the city to assist with the harvest. People frequently had to spend their vacations in the countryside. Captain Wladyslaw Harland, the acting military attache in Moscow, discussed this process in his report from 2 August 1933. In Kyiv, according to his data, 50,000 workers were mobilized, and in Kharkiv, which at that time was the capital, the number was even greater. Naturally the work done by a worker from the city was of lower quality than that of a peasant, as Harland noted: “The yield produced by this type of worker is extremely low; one can say, without exaggerating, that a single peasant is worth more than 15-20 city dwellers unaccustomed to this kind of work.”
The departure of workers from the city was frequently accompanied by typical Bolshevik propagandistic trappings, including speeches, orchestras, banners, slogans, and so forth. In a report for Polish intelligence regarding a speech given by a factory director in Kyiv on the occasion of the departure of a transport full of workers for the countryside, Sosnicki notes the following characteristic statement from the director: “We know,” he is quoted as saying, “that there is famine in the countryside, and cannibalism, but you are strong, seasoned workers, and it is up to you to raise their spirits out there.”
Henryk Sokolnicki, the counselor at the Polish legation in Moscow, pointed out yet another issue related to sending city dwellers to the country. He wondered whether after such a sojourn-forced to live under difficult conditions, frequently spending the night in the fields in the rain, and going hungry because of the poorly organized distribution of food-if they returned to the city, they would become “an element more easily susceptible to doubts, and less active on behalf of Soviet labor.”
The trips to the countryside frequently led to a disruption of work in various Soviet enterprises. Quite often, the smaller factories were simply shut down during the harvest, when their workers left for the countryside. Sosnicki informed Lieutenant Jerzy Niezbrzycki, head of the “East” Department at Division II of the Main Staff, that “in Kyiv, entire agencies were left practically abandoned, because the majority of employees have been sent to work elsewhere. In offices where five people used to work, there is now one. The factories are all closed. The civilian populace is registered in the street, in markets, and so forth.” Another dispatch reported a shortage of long-distance buses, since they had been sent to the countryside to carry grain.
Poles could not have failed to notice the introduction of internal passports at the end of December 1932. Their main purpose was to detain starving and dying farmers and prevent them from abandoning the countryside, since peasants, with very few exceptions, were not entitled to hold passports. This led to the establishment of a “Bolshevik serfdom,” with the peasant once more bound to the land, and the collective farm in the role of “master.” Moreover, the issuance of passports aimed to purge cities of the “alien class element.” Thousands of people who had fled famine-stricken rural villages for cities were declared enemies of the Soviet state and, in accordance with the regulations, were forced to leave the cities, since the majority did not qualify for a passport. Karszo-Siedlewski had no doubt about the true intentions behind the Bolsheviks’ actions. On 4 February 1933 he stated that the passport regulations served mainly as a convenient pretext for the GPU to dispose of politically suspect individuals.
In a Polish report directed to the head of the “East” Department of Division II of the Main Staff and dated December 1933, Lieutenant Gustaw Olszewski mentioned, among other things, the passport regulations. He noted that people who could not obtain a passport would have to leave their place of residence and, with nowhere else to go, would turn to a life of crime. He wrote,
Because of the aforementioned, there is a tremendous feeling of despondency among the people. Throwing several million people out into the countryside and the villages (which are themselves famine-stricken and, as collectives, are currently in the process of reducing personnel), without any supplies to help them live elsewhere, will lead to these people’s ruin. The majority of these people have no safeguard or support from acquaintances or relatives. They will form gangs and disrupt life in the provinces, which is miserable enough as it is.
A campaign as large-scale as the “passportization” of the country was, of course, subject to various kinds of irregularities, both on the part of those issuing the passports, and of the applicants. Failure to obtain a passport resulted, first of all, in the necessity to leave the area subject to the passport system, but it was also obvious that people without a passport-“kulak, criminal, or other antisocial elements,” as they were labeled in a ruling by the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR on 27 December 1932—sooner or later fell victim to one of several successive repressions. Therefore, as Tadeusz Pawlowski, the Polish consul in Kharkiv, and head of Intelligence Outpost “Kpl,” wrote on 29 March 1933, irregularities involving the issuing of passports in that city occurred at every step. He wrote that the militia had reportedly offered a fifteen-hundred-ruble reward for the detection of false passports (he added that “whether they’ll pay up is another question entirely”). The market price of a passport could be as high as five thousand rubles. The consul noted that as a result of “passportization” and the fact that people were being forced out of cities where they had lived for up to thirty years, there was an increase in the suicide rate and in cases of arson, with people burning down the buildings from which they were being evicted.
In June 1933 Polish intelligence reported that as a result of “passportization,” there had been a spike in the number of thefts-of passports, documents, and money. Every two to three days, visitors at the Polish consulate in Kyiv reported that their documents had been stolen, most often by professional thieves in waiting areas of train stations. There were also murders perpetrated against passport officials; in mid-April 1933, for example, three murders took place in the vicinity of Kharkiv.
The distribution of passports was accompanied by the widespread chaos typical of the Soviet system, which did not make the applicants’ situation any easier. Karszo-Siedlewski reported that there was a shortage of paper needed to print the required number of passports, and that occasionally provincial authorities and organizations printed their official certificates and identity cards for passports on, among other materials, strips of torn wallpaper.
According to records from the Polish consulate in Kharkiv dated 12 April 1933, over 150,000 people were evicted in the course of three months in the Donbas alone. However, there was no available information about their subsequent fate. Many of them likely joined the ranks of the unemployed; others no doubt turned to crime.
The situation of people without passports was not corrected at any later point. In a general report for May 1935, Wladyslaw Michniewicz, an intelligence officer at outpost B.18 and coordinator for Polish intelligence outposts at the Polish consulates in Kyiv and Kharkiv, wrote that a large number of people without passports could not find work in any city, and at the same time, that the majority of jobs were going to people condemned to forced labor.
In Polish reports written after the Great Famine, the consequences of the famine are mentioned for the most part in descriptions of the situation in the countryside; as for the consequences for large cities, the number of references is very slight. At the same time, a sizable amount of material is devoted to the situation in small towns after 1933. Consular staff linked, though not always directly, the unfortunate-even downright tragic-situations in small towns to the period of the famine. The available materials, however, make it clear that the worsening situation of local populations, as well as the overall decline of these areas, were direct consequences of the events of 1929-33.
Polish diplomatic and intelligence reports reveal that after the cataclysm of the Stalinist famine, political and economic relations, both in the countryside and in small towns, became relatively stable only around the beginning of 1936. By then, in the opinion of Polish observers, a gradual improvement in peoples’ lives had begun, but this did not mean that their standard of living was high. For that, as Karszo-Siedlewski aptly points out, would have triggered aspirations in social and political areas, which, in turn, would have posed a threat to the dictatorship. It is always easier to deal with a populace absorbed in the problems of day-to-day existence than one that is content, the diplomat observed.
Some information about the consequences of the famine and its indirect impact on small towns can be found in the travel reports of Michniewicz, who made excursions into outlying areas. In a report dated 31 August 1935, he stated that in rural areas in southern Ukraine, the number of peasant cottages had thinned out significantly, citing this as evidence of “dekulakization” and famine. About a third of these cottages were in ruins or had left behind mere traces. However, extreme poverty-according to Michniewicz-was not evident in the countryside, which had even begun to exhibit a certain amount of purchasing power, as shops and markets in the cities demonstrated.
However, the small towns in southern Ukraine that had been devastated after collectivization and the Great Famine made a significantly worse impression on Michniewicz. He noted,
Villages in the southern regions are largely ruined; strikingly so, even for one accustomed to similar sights in northern areas. Villages such as Kryve Ozero, Konetspol, Stanislavchyk, and Sofiivka in the environs of Pervomaisk and Balta are three-quarters destroyed. Houses stand in ruins or, at best, are dilapidated and tumbled down from disrepair. The populations of such villages are almost exclusively Jewish; previously, they had worked in trade or as small businessmen; now they are enduring terrible poverty and dying out. The younger, more energetic generation, however, has fled to the [large-R.K.] cities, leading to the large-scale Jewification [zazydzenie] of the entire government and party apparatus. The sole ornament in these villages (and only in some) are the lone houses of culture or regional government, recently built in order to document the progress of socialist building projects, rather than out of necessity.
The Polish official was far more favorably impressed by villages with a permanent military garrison, as well as by towns in the Moldavian Autonomous Republic such as Balta, Dubasari, and Ananiv. These latter towns, which looked little worse than before the war, had fared better because the populations of the borderlands had suffered fewer repressions.
Almost a year later, on 8 June 1936, Michniewicz gave a similar evaluation regarding the state of Ukrainian towns, which had suffered a decline during the Bolshevik experiment, and in which, after the Great Famine, virtually nothing had changed for the better, but rather had continued to worsen. In his report, the Polish official related an interesting exchange he had had with locals standing in a long bread line in the town of Pavoloch, near Popilnia in the Kyiv Region. When he approached the line and asked what they were waiting for, they answered “bread” and, crowding around him, began to complain about the government, saying (verbatim): “This is worse than ’32-33”; “Were starving”; “That crook from the District Executive Committee doesn’t care about anything”; “You drive around in cars while were dying”; “Tell them everything over at the Center.” The report ends: “I had to escape as quickly as possible.”
Similar impressions are noted in reports by other Polish officials. In a report dated 20 June 1935, regarding a tour of Ukraine undertaken on 15-16 June 1935 (itinerary: Bila Tserkva, Uman, Haisyn, Bratslav, Nemyriv, Kalynivka, Makhnivka, Fastiv), Piotr Kurnicki, the Polish vice-consul in Kyiv, claimed that the small towns had all made equally bad impressions. Uman, while relatively large, struck Kurnicki as being in terrible disrepair, with few stores, crude infrastructure, dust, filth in the streets, and so on. Things were even worse in the smaller towns (Bratslav, Nemyriv, Bila Tserkva, Voronovytsia). Kurnicki noted that, having been acquainted with these cities since before the Revolution, he could attest to how drastically they had changed for the worse.
In a letter to Division II dated 29 September 1935, Karszo-Siedlewski noted that “in those days,” he had traveled for several days from Kyiv to Dnipropetrovsk, and his conviction was reconfirmed that the worst conditions prevailed not in the countryside, but in small towns, which “were either perishing altogether, or turning into agricultural centers; in other words, ordinary rural areas, in which trade is disappearing.”
Polish archives also contain information about the impact of the famine- and the collectivization and dekulakization that had preceded it-on the significant outflow of people from the countryside to large factories in the Donbas. A report dated 31 August 1934 from the intelligence outpost “Barnaba,” regarding the “state of factory and mine workers in the Donbas,” confirmed that up until 1933 work in the Donbas had declined owing to a shortage of labor. However, beginning with the “dizziness from success” of collectivization (as well as the attendant famine and annihilation of the peasants), the situation had changed, as peasants fleeing the famine found work in the Donbas. This, in turn, explained the implementation of the coal program (plan) over the previous two years.
In a report dated 5 May 1935 under Kurnicki’s supervision, Jan Karszo-Siedlewski noted that Bolshevik policies in the countryside were based on its maximum exploitation, and that the lack of even minimal advantages for peasants resulted in “everyone who could leave the countryside unpunished running off and finding work elsewhere.” Kurnicki pointed out that the number of men in the countryside was significantly diminished. Apart from the privileged tractor drivers and collective farm officials, numerous rural and MTS (Machine Tractor Station) men aged twenty four and older sought work in the cities. As a result, women became the most economically active cohort in the countryside, “occupying numerous responsible positions and performing a range of difficult jobs.”
However, despite the large outpouring of rural populations into industry, the fluidity of the workforce in the Donbas remained an issue, particularly in the worst-paying and most difficult branches of industry. Usually such work was done by rural workers who would return to their villages when there was a temporary improvement in food provisions in the countryside. But even when some of these workers left, their place was taken by others eager for work, who sought to improve their lot, and for whom employment in industry was a way to earn money and escape the countryside. Jan Lagoda, who journeyed through the Donbas on a working assignment between 12 and 23 November 1935, noted,
Although unemployment exists, it has not reached serious dimensions; the surplus affects workers who have not yet severed their ties with agriculture, and are therefore able to wait out the critical period in the countryside. Because the Soviet government has an impact on the main source of the labor force, that is to say, the countryside, it is able, as long as the countryside obeys it, to exert appropriate pressure on this source and to mold the supply of workers according to the needs of industry The question of wiping out this influence is currently under intensive discussion in industrial circles.
Peasants originally from the countryside but employed in heavy industry in the city, having experienced firsthand “the benefits of the socialist modernization of agriculture,” were among the most skeptical and radical opponents of the Bolshevik system. The above-cited report from the “Barnaba” outpost notes that in the cities young people and Komsomol members had stopped using propagandistic Bolshevik slogans about prosperity and achievement, because the incoming peasants looking for work were the clearest evidence of the government’s cruelty and tyranny in the countryside.
On 1 August 1937, Jerzy Kaminski, the head of outpost X.37, on the basis of intelligence from his informant (a Czech from Horlivka who was leaving the USSR), wrote that young workers were generally sympathetic to the government, because they had not had an opportunity to see the terrible consequences of communist policies in the countryside. The more skeptical young people, relatively few in number, were those recruited from collective farms.
The engineer Petro Franko wrote a highly interesting report, which considers the famine as the consequence of a kind of conflict between cities and the countryside for grain. Franko, who was the son of Ivan Franko and originally from Lviv, worked in Kharkiv between 1931 and 1936 as a researcher. In Poland, Franko wrote a letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Warsaw in which he describes the research he did in Soviet Ukraine. Division 11 of the Main Staff took an interest in this issue, and Franko was invited to Warsaw for a meeting. Franko arrived in Warsaw on 11 December 1936. We have no information about the meeting itself, but the next letter sent to Division 11 indicates that he had been working on several pieces (most likely books or a longer report, 1 would speculate), and that he had asked about his prospects for employment at the Research Institute. Appended to the letter was a fifteen-page handwritten section titled “The Countryside.”
The report began by examining the situation in the famine-stricken countryside. There is a striking passage about an instance of cannibalism related by a teacher, identified as “N.”—the wife of a Kharkiv engineer whom Franko knew. A woman who had not had any news from her rural family went to search for them in the countryside around Kharkiv. The land was neglected; the cottages looked abandoned. She went into her cottage, and there was no one there. She looked at the hearth. Someone was there; with difficulty she recognized her brother, who stared at her with a demented look in his eyes. “Ha ha!” he whispered in a deranged voice. “How nice you look, how plump. I’m going to eat you. I’ve eaten everyone!” She escaped, but later fell gravely ill, became delirious, and died shortly afterwards.
Next, as has already been indicated, Franko situates the famine-its causes as well as its consequences-within the conflict between the proletarian communist city and the conservative peasant countryside, which the city wanted to exploit and subjugate. According to the engineer, the city wished to exploit the peasants and their labor without offering anything in return. When the peasants realized what was happening, they became rebellious and began to look out for their own interests, producing only enough for themselves. The city, in turn, and its communist leaders, responded by attempting to proletarianize the countryside and turn it into a “passive instrument in the hands of the worker.” The city, which Franko equated with Bolshevik power, succeeded completely. But this only exacerbated the hatred that the countryside felt for the city as it “awaited its moment of liberation.”
“What were the causes of the famine of 1932-33?” asks Franko, and proceeds to give a broad account.
After the Revolution, the workers considered themselves the salt of the earth, in charge of the state of affairs that they had brought about. Victory had turned their heads. They took the place of the bourgeoisie they had defeated, and work became burdensome for them. The city did not function well. The most essential things were produced in very small quantities and were of poor quality. Often the city would take products made in the countryside in exchange for their factory-made items. Thus, while the countryside functioned relatively well, the city worked badly. The peasant received nothing for his labor, so he simply rebelled. He did not consider himself any worse than the city worker. He started to grow only as much as he himself needed: “No factories or steel, no bread.” The city was on the verge of famine. But the city was already organized, while the countryside was not. The city had weapons, strength, and leaders who did not back down from anything. They had beaten all those bourgeois—why shouldn’t they beat the countryside, proletarianize the peasant, and turn him into a passive tool in the hands of the worker? The GPU systematically began to harvest crops and export them to cities. Even people who paid a tax had everything taken from them. Even people who worked on collective farms had to give up their hard-earned workday credits [trudoden’]. The government “justified” this terrible lesson (the famine) to its own citizens by presenting it as a way of breaking the resistance of kulaks and their fellow travelers[podkulachniki], and, to a far greater degree, as a way to prevent external intervention. Everywhere, and at every opportunity, the masses were informed that Poland, in agreement with Germany, was ready for an intervention, and that Ukraine was completely flooded with enemy agents who were gaining support in the countryside. Was this true? Nobody believed it. Everyone knew that this was a completely normal reaction to the extraordinary exploitation of the countryside by the city. The villagers did not want to be like Negro slaves. In the confrontation, the organized city emerged victorious. First the city divided the countryside into two antagonistic camps: the poor and the prosperous. With the city’s help, the poor physically destroyed the prosperous. But work in the countryside began to go even more poorly. Then the countryside was divided into those satisfied with the regime and those who were dissatisfied. The latter were labeled “counterrevolutionaries,” “white bandits,” and “hirelings of the interventionists.” These elements were quickly destroyed as well. They were destroyed through terror, randomly, and ultimately through provocation. All power centers of administration and labor for collective farms, state farms, the MTSs, political sections in the countryside, rural and regional councils, etc., fell into party hands—most frequently to Jews [sic] and Russians [sic]. But all these efforts did not stamp out the countryside’s hatred for the city. This hatred only settled in the deep recesses of oppressed souls where it patiently awaited the moment of liberation.
As we can see, Franko concluded with a contention regarding the countryside’s distrust for the city, which further escalated in 1933. This distrust- hatred, even-was not neutralized by the relative improvement in the rural population’s welfare in the latter half of the 1930s. In a letter to the ambassador in Moscow dated 21 August 1937, Jan Karszo-Siedlewski described the general state of affairs in Soviet Ukraine, noting,
At the same time, I must admit that there is no famine in the countryside, and that the population, the children in particular, look better. A significant increase in the birthrate is obvious. Admittedly, I have nowhere encountered enthusiasm for work or for the Soviet system, but my general impression is that the rural populace has grown accustomed to the new collective order, which tolerates a certain minimum as far as private property is concerned. Resistant elements, or those living according to the old traditions, have been finally rooted out, but throughout the entire rural populace one can sense a palpable aversion to, and distrust of, the city [emphasis mine-R.K.]-and government representatives as a whole-as factors excessively exploiting rural labor and taking for themselves the lions share of its fruits.
With the end of the Great Famine the countryside, at least, entered a period of relative calm, but in the land of “workers and peasants” as a whole, repressions-culminating with the “Yezhovshchina”-began to affect more and more layers of society. There was also a rise in the exploitation of workers through the communist-enforced Stakhanovite movement. In this context it is worth noting the view put forward by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs; namely, that after the end of collectivization and the famine, when the Bolsheviks had dispensed with the peasants, the time had come to deal with the workers. A secret bulletin distributed by the ministry titled “Poland and Abroad” (dated 14 December 1936, no. 14), which was then numbered and sent to Polish diplomatic outposts, contains a thesis about the “gradations of exploitation of peasant and worker.” According to the ministry, the costs of industrial development to that point had been borne by exploitation of the countryside, but now most of the burden had fallen on the masses of workers. Among these burdens, the heaviest was no doubt the aforementioned Stakhanovite campaign, which the Polish diplomats discussed at length.
This thesis was contested by Waclaw Grzybowski, the Polish ambassador in Moscow, who claimed that this was a spurious argument. According to him, in the USSR it was the person as such who was exploited. “In the process of collectivization, the peasant was subjected to special types of repression, since these were the most effective means of coercing him into switching to the system of collectivization. These repressions lost their purpose once peasant resistance was broken and collectivization carried out. The matter was sealed by a certain equalization of rights among the urban proletariat and the peasantry.”
Polish reports contain a great deal of material about the trajectory of the repressions, starting with the Great Terror, as well as attempts to analyze their causes and consequences. However, among these materials one cannot find anything specific to set Ukraine apart from what was happening throughout the USSR, unlike in the case of the Great Famine, whose Ukrainian “specificity” was never in doubt.
There are few analyses of demographic trends in cities after 1933. In addition to the above-cited descriptions of cheap, fluid labor from the countryside being enlisted for industry, one should mention a report by the head of the Second Section of the Staff of the Ukrainian People’s Army, General Vsevolod Zhmiienko, titled Valuable Statements (Cenne oswiadczenia), which he wrote for Polish intelligence on the basis of official Soviet data. In his report, Zhmiienko cited official Soviet data indicating an increase in the population of Ukrainian cities from four million in 1927 to seven million in 1933.
There is nothing strange about the rise in urban populations. It grew at the expense of starving Ukrainian farmers wandering from city to city in search of bread, which was no longer available in the countryside, having been torn from their mouths by force. The growth of the urban population is therefore nothing to be pleased about. It did not come about normally. Furthermore, we must determine how many aliens made their way to Ukrainian cities. The population of Ukraine, the peasants, are perishing, dying out, deteriorating, because fathers exhausted by hunger and work are producing weak offspring.
There are Polish materials that mention the migration of Russians and Belarusians to the Ukrainian countryside, which had been deserted during the Holodomor; the attitudes (generally very negative) of locals toward the migrants; the departure of newcomers for their own homes, and so on. However, they contain no references to similar processes in the cities. If Polish diplomats could make note of certain clear-cut demographic shifts in the abandoned villages, either with their own eyes or through their informants, the situation in cities was more complicated. Cities, particularly those with a burgeoning industry, were multiethnic, and in the absence of objective Soviet statistics, trends in migration were difficult to ascertain. On 17 October 1936, Karszo-Siedlewski, undoubtedly the most competent Polish diplomat working in Soviet Ukraine, compiled a report for the ambassador in Moscow titled “Population Movements in Ukraine.” In this report, he presented the extent of the Polish agency’s knowledge on this subject. He wrote,
Concerning migration movements in Ukraine, which are motivated by political and economic considerations, such as: (1) mass displacement of populations for military reasons from Right-Bank Ukraine, as a frontier area; (2) mass displacement to other republics and population flight to cities in the years of forced collectivization and famine in the countryside; (3) the growth of cities and small towns; (4) industrial development and recruitment of workers for factories and mines; (5) expulsion to the countryside of excess population from certain northern cities; (6) colonization of several fertile areas, deserted in 1930-34, etc.; these trends continue to this day, albeit at a significantly lower rate. The mass relocations from the frontier areas have ended, as have the great processes of collectivization and the rapid industrialization of the country, which caused a constant displacement of peoples between the countryside and the cities. Normal emigration and immigration to Ukraine continues to this day; however, the local authorities have not provided any relevant figures.